Disruptive Technology and Cognitive Overheard As Measures of Success

UBot Studio is one of the most unique internet marketing products available because it’s disruptive technology.

Non-programmers can use it to build professional marketing products for themselves or for others, when before they would have had to hire a programmer, a programming team, or even outsourcers to do the job. Those non-programmers can sell that product, which opens up a whole software market to users who before relied on experts to get the job done. It puts software creation into the hands of any consumer, in the way that Adobe Photoshop puts photo manipulation, or WordPress puts website creation, into the hands of anybody with a camera or an internet connection. Or one of our favorites, Kickstarter, which puts the power to fund an idea or product into the hands of anyone who thinks it should succeed.

If you’re ever in doubt about whether or not your own product will succeed, just start to consider whether or not it helps users do something that before was out of their reach entirely — and if it does so in a way that competes with an already-existing market. If so, it’s disruptive technology, and it just might be The Next Big Thing.

A few more disruptive technologies to help get your creative juices flowing include Netflix, Youtube, Mp3s, and 3D Printers, all of which compete with an existing market by putting power into the hands of the consumer (and taking power out of the hands of the music industry/publishers, large manufacturing firms, and the big television/movie houses.)

But being an innovative product in your market isn’t the only important part of disruption. Disruptive technology must not only be innovative, it must be intuitive and easy-to-use, or else the amazing idea will never get off the ground.

This is because it can be quite difficult to explain concepts that are disruptive precisely because they are out of the ordinary. For instance, thinking of UBot Studio like the average SEO software, which simply puts the power of data (like SEOMoz), or of backlinking (like SeNuke), into the hands of whoever can afford it, is missing a lot of its potential. But explaining that you can use it to create your own SEO products, or marketing or automation tools, is a little confusing.

The solution is in design. An innovative product must be extremely simple to use or it will never catch on. In a recent blog post about “cognitive overhead,” the co-founder of the company Bump, which makes the popular data-sharing app for smartphones, writes about what makes a concept easy to understand: “how many logical connections or jumps your brain has to make in order to understand or contextualize the thing you’re looking at.”

I’d argue that this is the most important part of disruptive technology after how disruptive it is. The more disruptive it is, the less cognitive overhead it needs to use:

Every year for the past four years we’ve been the only company in the internet marketing field that’s working to help grow the software market by allowing anyone to create cool products quickly and easily (we were left off MIT’s 50 Disruptive Companies list again this year…one day we’ll be on it!).

This is partly because the software’s cognitive overhead is significant. But we’re currently working on soon-to-be-released new features to make UBot Studio even simpler to use. You’ll be hearing more about them soon. Meanwhile, as you keep looking to create the next big disruptive innovation, remember to keep lowering your products’ cognitive overhead proportionally. Do both those things and I guarantee you’ll end up with something extraordinary.